The antidote to ideologies

GREEK DEBT: How EU Tory Mr Denial Humbug MEP wrote a Telegraph column about it, and missed out only twenty key facts

Rentaview journalism from another featherweight at the Maily Barclaygraph

If you wondered why Peter Oborne resigned in disgust from the Daily Telegraph, this might help explain.

A great many of my Greek contacts and friends may not know much about Daniel Hannan MEP. Today the Daily Torynaff has awarded Dan a whole column to himself in order to explain to we lesser mortals how Greece ran a budget surplus last year, but now Syriza’s “leftist dogma” has thrown that turning point away.

Daniel Hannan tells us that ‘Greece…..has reached the point where it could successfully go it alone, provided it made a clean default. But, under its current leaders, it seems determined to throw those advantages away and return to the tax-and-spend policies that caused its crisis in the first place.’

It’s important to wear your Greek poppycock with pride, but this dissembling marks a new low in Dan’s career of barely scratching the surface of the superficial.

I’ve been reading Mr Hannan’s continuing slavish devotion to neoliberal claptrap for some six years now, and as usual – in this particular instance – he skates ever so elegantly over the many uncomfortable ethics and facts involved in the situation. Thus he offers no mention – let alone analysis – of these twenty points which destroy his hopelessly uninformed opinion:

1. How the debt was derived, why it is, after six years of austerity, now nearly twice the size it was before, and how the fiddled budget surplus for 2014 was a whopping one 360th of the Greek national debt.

2. How Yanis Varoufakis of Syriza railed against the debt accumulation from 2006 onwards.

3. The cynical way in which both the EC and Berlin both encouraged the Greeks to buy armaments with the borrowings, and then exaggerate how bad the situation was

4. How 2/3rds of the debt could be written off by the ECB with not a scintilla of harm to either the bank itself or the eurozone citizens it so risibly claims to represent

5. Of the remaining 1/3rd, 50% is unreal money that comes courtesy of the mad FRB banking system which Mr Hannan so admires

6. If both these realities were accepted by Troika2, Greece’s debt would be eminently manageable

7. If the original debt had been written off in 2009, the ECB’s balance sheet would be €210bn to the good

8. The real creditors got away with at worst break even and at best a profit margin of some 25%, having bought cynically on the junk market at 10c on the $

9. Hollande and Merkel insist on Greece “meeting its obligations” when neither of them has ever met any of theirs since the day the euro was launched on an unsuspecting world

10. If Wolfgang Schäuble had cancelled the arms contract that alone ran up a €150bn of the debt, none of us would be in this position….but he refused

11. Greece has still only received 1 of the 2 submarines it ordered under that contract

12. Germany has dumped secondary Austrian banks in the mire by reneging on all “its obligations”

13. Only a democratic election put Syriza in the position of having overwhelming citizen support to reduce the country’s debt burden: the Troika would vastly prefer to deal with the crooks who ran up the debt in the first place

14. The creditors’ sole strategy now is to load austerity onto the backs of 10.5m Greeks, at least 97% of whom gained no benefit from it

15. Germany had all its massive war debts written off in 1947, and never paid a penny of reparations to the Greeks they starved half to death for three years

16. Greece is NOT asking for more money, it wants only a brief debt moratorium followed by debt restructuring

17. Greece has slipped back into recession because Draghi and his cohorts have manipulated the fiscalities to make normal economic activity impossible.

18. Grexit is not possible for two years…as an MEP, I would expect Mr Hannan to understand that

19. Whatever he may think of “radical Leftists” the average Greek would far rather have Pinnochio as Prime Minister than a return to the previous ventriloquists’ dummies.

20. In nine weeks of negotiations, Syriza has made 7 major concessions, while the Troika has made, um, none.

You may wonder how Daniel Hannan can mount such a shamefully ignorant column of disinformation as this one, but the answer is simple: he is a shameless professional politician – able thanks to unwarranted privilege to avoid ever having done a day’s commercial work in his life – thence to progress via private school and Oxbridge to a life of Westminster internship before becoming MEP for South East England.

You may in turn wonder how Dan can hate the European Union and loathe David Cameron, and yet be a Conservative Member of the European Parliament. And the answer to that riddle is that he is an unprincipled spinning electron capable of holding two diametric positions at the same time.

And as all good physicists know, an electron is a negatively charged particle of almost no substance, with a charge of 1.6022 x 10–19 Coulomb – that is, infinitessimally weighty.

It’s important to know the provenance of such opinions. I trust the remaining Telegraph loyalists with a degree of intellect now feel somewhat better informed on the issue.

As for the Greeks, well – you’ve all been dished this kind of dirt for too long now to worry, I suppose. But if you have to let it be water off a duck’s back, wouldn’t it be nice if the water was clean for a change?

You’ve nailed it! Banks create money out of thin air, lend it, charge interest on it, then threaten Armageddon when someone asks, where did the money come from and rummage around for the interest payment.

@JW
“…I trust the remaining Telegraph loyalists with a degree of intellect now feel somewhat better informed on the issue…”
As a Physicist and a Telegraph “reader”, I fully endorse your views. I did point out a while back that the Torynaff is still the best broadsheet for making spills for the fire…
WAD

The Barclay Pantograph, along with the rest of the Midstream Media (ask a urologist), has long ago abandoned any attempt at objective analysis, this we know. Denial Hannan, I may have misspelled his name but can’t seem to locate the error, is just another useful useless idiot.

BBC radio just said the Greek Central Bank said Greece was on a collision course with its creditors…nothing more nothing less. … ” and I am supposed to pay a license fee to hear this level of ineptitude and political bias”
Truly who is worse, BBC or DT?

“You may wonder how Daniel Hannan can mount such a shamefully ignorant column of disinformation as this one, but the answer is simple: he is a shameless professional politician – able thanks to unwarranted privilege to avoid ever having done a day’s commercial work in his life – thence to progress via private school and Oxbridge to a life of Westminster internship before becoming MEP for South East England.”

…and don’t forget his father was a British diplomat, so his whole existence has been funded, directly or indirectly, from the taxpayer teat.

Daniel Hannan fits in perfectly at the Telegraph because he is a sly and two-faced propagandist for the Americans. The USA’s aim is a weakened Europe (and a weakened everywhere else, come to that) so that the rapidly disintegrating USA can remain top dog. This means breaking European unity, and particularly breaking the currency bloc which they see as threatening the dollar.
The American control of the Telegraph is why you hardly ever read articles even mildly critical of the USA, while the EU is excoriated for doing too much or too little at every opportunity.

Ackshully, I skimmed through the last couple of days’ worth while visiting mother, the proof reading is now very sloppy. For a large organisation whose business is the written word, they lack a good deal of authenticity. The Grauniad, on the other hand…

Reading this article, and the responses is one thing.
Reading Wikipedia , I see that Dan Hannan is the son of an ex British army cotton farmer from Bolivia. His profile of outstanding achievements may leave a bitter taste, but they outclass my, and your wasted pathetic lives added together by a country mile.
I have the utmost respect for Dan Hannan, and I have no fear in saying so.

Some great points. A qualification is needed on:
“18. Grexit is not possible for two years…as an MEP, I would expect Mr Hannan to understand that”

Two years is indeed the default, but it could be lengthened or shortened by agreement of all parties.

Obviously if Greece (or equally any other EU member) breaches its treaty obligations, then the others could terminate the EU agreement with Greece, albeit leaving an administrative mess that would take a while to sort out. Most likely the European Court would get involved and Greece would have its voting rights suspended if it did not cooperate. If Greece then refused to dance to the EU tune, arrangements would probably be made for it to trade with the EU via the EEA.

@JW
Wikipedia says about Hannan:
“Hannan advocates localism, and he has written several books arguing for democratic reform. He is a Eurosceptic and is strongly critical of European integration. Besides politics, Hannan is a journalist; he has written newspaper leaders, currently writes a blog for The Daily Telegraph and has published several books. Born in Peru, Hannan speaks Spanish and French fluently.[4] He occasionally delivers speeches to the European Parliament in Spanish.[5]”